Review on 'The Story of Stuff'

The first thing that crossed my mind when watching "The Story of Stuff" is that we consume too much but we waste too much as well without we even realized it. The narrator of the story, Annie Leonard revealed a system called 'Materials Economy': extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. The system is pretty much related to us. In order to make stuff, we extracting the natural resources without stopping and we don’t realize that most of the natural resources have been used up. I am concerned to what Annie Leonard said, less than 4% of original forest left in the U.S. With such a small number of trees left here, the big corporations in the U.S. come and build factories in the Third-World countries, exploit their natural resources and have the residents of the Third-World countries to work with them. If we see this from ethical issue, I could say that their rights are being violated. Annie also mentioned that the ultimate purpose of government is producing more consumer-goods. Did government think that this is a wise idea? I don’t think that it is a brilliant idea. The current total consumptions nowadays are already over-the-limit and cause too much problem to us, such as pollution. If they intended to continue that purpose, our planet might blow off. The ideas of planned and perceived obsolescence are pretty much interesting. It made me realizes that capitalism influences the production-making companies to produce stuff that can be useless as soon as possible (planned obsolescence) and convince us to throw away the stuff that are perfectly useful (perceived obsolescence). As to maintain the M-C-M' paradigm, they keep producing new stuff that are more attractive and portable, so that the new products catch the attention of the consumers and provide them more wealth. For example, the iPods. A new version of iPod is announced almost every year and it has pretty much the same functions as the old one. However, the manufacturer changes the way that iPod looks – making it more attractive in design and smaller, we, the consumers are most likely to buy the new one even though we have the old version of it. The advertisements on the television also act like catalysts to us to buy a new stuff because they make us feel wrong, unhappy, and outdated with the stuff that we have. Nevertheless, all stuff that we consumed will eventually end up to the garbage. It is undeniable that we shop non-stop. I agree too, but 99.9% of our stuff is trashed within 6 months. It does not worth right? Therefore, we should start recycling, reduce the consumption of stuff and produce efficient yet long-lasting stuff albeit it does not help much; at least we are trying to save our beloved Earth.